Two co-founders of Bridge Network, a web3 startup backed by FTX, have left the company after a management dispute. The conflict centred on control of the company and a disagreement over access to the company’s bank accounts. Kimberly Adams, the founding director, and Favour Uzoaru have left the startup, leaving Samuel Eke, the third co-founder and former chief technology officer, as the company’s CEO. 

Samuel laid off nearly two dozen employees shortly after becoming the company’s CEO. He moved operational funds to a new crypto wallet, which triggered an investigation by Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). “The EFCC investigated the matter and cleared me because the matter was civil and not criminal,” Samuel told TechCabal. He said the layoffs were necessary because the company ran out of cash. Kimberly and Favour declined to comment on the matter.

Bridge Network was founded in 2021 after Kimberly shared the idea of a solution that would allow people to move digital assets from one blockchain to another with her co-founder, Favour. They connected on a forum discussion on the social audio platform Clubhouse. At the time, Favour was working at YC-backed fintech BuyPower and was reportedly looking to build his own tech startup. Two sources said Favour recruited Samuel, who could write code in Solidity—a programming language for developing blockchain applications. He also recruited a product designer to join the team. Together, the four-person team worked on the minimum viable product for Bridge Network.

The Barbados-based startup raised over $3.8 million from FTX and around 50 other investors. Its primary product was Token Bridge, which enabled interoperability across various blockchain networks, allowing cryptocurrency users to transfer their digital assets seamlessly across networks. The startup was also developing NFT Bridge and Bridge Pay. NFT Bridge allows users transfer non-fungible tokens (NFTs) across blockchains while Bridge Pay is a multi-chain non-custodial payment tool that enables users to connect Web3 wallets to fiat virtual or physical debit cards to spend their assets in the real world. The payment solution was focused on emerging markets.

In an email seen by TechCabal, the company’s former chief operating officer called the dispute “a well-coordinated palace coup,” claiming that Kimberly tried to force him and Samuel out of the company. In February, Kimberly tweeted that she left the startup “due to the differences amongst the co-founders and myself on how the project should be run.” 

The use case for Bridge Networks is compelling. The company’s Token Bridge allows users to easily move one asset from one blockchain to another. This is increasingly important as the number of blockchain networks has grown into the thousands. Given how expensive it is to move assets across a blockchain, Bridge offered access to cheaper alternate blockchain networks. But the startup has struggled to gain traction. One source with knowledge of the company’s numbers said it averaged 1.3 million transactions in three months. “But when Bridge finally launched it, it only saw 600–1000 transactions daily,” the source told TechCabal. 

As the company struggled to gain traction, sources said Kimberly’s confidence in her team—which had grown to about 25 people—waned. According to one source who worked at the company, “She took a swipe, calling all employees ‘incompetent’ and not of great quality.” It’s unclear if her claims were true. While Samuel, the CTO, wrote in his public profile that he had years of experience working as a software engineer, he only spent four months working in a blockchain-related role before joining Bridge Network.  According to the same sources, Favour and Kimberly occasionally discussed possibly replacing Samuel as the company experienced delays in developing other products, NFT Bridge and Bridge Pay.

Another source close to Kimberly told TechCabal that it was Favour that Kim wanted out. “The only person who meaningfully contributed to the project was Samuel. The only thing Favour did was connect Kimberly to Samuel,” the source said.

The dispute escalated in December 2022 when Kimberly requested Favour’s signature to revoke Samuel’s access to the company’s multi-signatory account, where the startup’s USDC assets were held. In an email to investors, Favour said he believed taking such action without first discussing it with Samuel was unfair, so he declined. He also told Samuel about the situation.

Subsequently, Kimberly demanded that the two co-founders step down. In a letter to investors, Favour claimed she restricted him from accessing his work email and the company tools. She also removed Samuel’s AWS account from the backend, causing the Bridge app and website to go offline temporarily.

In January 2023, Kimberly told at least one investor that she had asked one of the co-founders to step down to reduce the burn rate. At the time, the price of Bitcoin had fallen 75% from its all-time high in 2021, and Bridge Network’s notable investor, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, had collapsed, dampening confidence in the crypto market. Kimberly told investors in an email seen by TechCabal, “This decision has caused a ripple effect which brings us to this point,” referring to the ensuing dispute between her and her co-founders.

An investor who asked not to be named told TechCabal, “On the one hand, Favour was sending [investor] emails from [his personal email account] saying that Kimberly was trying to kick him and Samuel out. On the other hand, Kimberly told me that they were trying to strong-arm her out of the company.” 

Kimberly resigned from her position as director of Bridge on January 9 but reversed her decision the following day, citing concerns that her two cofounders could not deal with the pressure of running the business. One of her emails to investors read, “My co-founders have since spent over 100K USD of company funds on legal fees, something I did not approve. These proceedings have hurt our treasury but not my passion and drive. I am ready to rebuild and go again after this has settled.”

Kimberly continued negotiating with both Favour and Samuel, who reportedly demanded $560,000 in severance if they were to leave the company. They later reduced their demand to $340,000. Kimberly reportedly made a counteroffer of $266,000, which included $116,000 in legal fees, but Samuel and Favour refused. A source familiar with the matter told TechCabal that Favour and Samuel never owned equity in the company.

As attempts to reach an agreement stalled, Kimberly eventually left the organisation in February. Some investors aware of the events began requesting a refund of their investments.  Kimberly declined to comment on the matter. But Samuel insisted that investors had no right to ask for refunds. “They bought the company’s token (BRDG), so we were not obligated to make any refunds, but we only obliged them out of goodwill,” Samuel told TechCabal. Bridge Networks raised funding with a Simple Agreement for Future Token (SAFT). A SAFT is a contractual agreement at the time of the launch of a token, creating ownership rights for token investors at a future date. 

Samuel, the co-founder who emerged successful from the internal dispute, told TechCabal, “We are still building, but the company has repaid investors who demanded a refund upon the resignation of my co-founders.” While none of the founders said exactly how much was reimbursed to all investors, Samuel noted that legal battles and the repayment of investors left a big hole in the company’s finances. And with investor interest in Web3 waning, fundraising will likely be difficult.

After trying to raise more funding from investors in April, Favour resigned as co-founder and COO to work on other personal projects. Samuel insists that the company is still operating and that users can expect the launch of new features like the NFT Bridge soon. 

However, a user on the Bridge Network Telegram group said, “The last time the developer made any comment here was during the AMA [Ask Me Anything] session six months ago.” The domain name of the company’s website has also expired. In September, crypto exchange platform MEXC, which facilitates digital asset trading, delisted the startup’s token, BRDG. In a message to the Telegram channel, Samuel assured users that he was discussing with potential investors to turn the situation around. 

“I’ll pay you with eNaira” was my colleague’s way of teasing me about repaying a loan. If he were to pay into my eNaira wallet, I’d have virtually no way of spending the money. Most merchants in Nigeria don’t accept the country’s digital currency, and not many tech-savvy folks are convinced that this blockchain-based money has what it takes for mainstream adoption. Despite the investments of the central bank of Nigeria, Nigerians do not care much about the eNaira, Africa’s first central bank digital currency (CBDC). Mr Tobi Aremotobi, a Lagos-based digital finance expert, refers to the venture as “an exercise in futility”.

Launched in October 2021, the eNaira became the world’s second public CBDC, after the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar project. Two months away from a second anniversary, the digital currency is still struggling with adoption. A recent IMF report showed that the average number of eNaira transactions is about 14,000 per week—only 1.5% of the number of wallets. This suggests that 98.5% of wallets, for any given week, have not been used even once. These numbers reflect a “disappointingly low adoption”.

A use case, please?

Many Nigerians have stressed that the eNaira lacks a use case compelling enough for them. According to the CBN’s master plan, the low transfer fees should drive eNaira adoption among Nigerians, especially among the youth demography who have demonstrated market potential for startups offering digital-first financial services. However, as it turns out, low-cost transfers take less priority than the form in which the money gets moved. 

Money can be either cash or digital. And when it’s digital, it can be either centralised fiat or decentralised cryptocurrency. The eNaira—like all CBDCs—doesn’t fit into either category. It introduces a new class of digital money that most Nigerians are only just discovering, right as they are being urged to adopt. The corollary effect, therefore, is hesitation. 

“I still can’t wrap my head around why we need another digital means of keeping money that takes away some banking perks,“ Aremotobi said. “If the eNaira remains a means to transfer value or pay my bills online, it is welcome to queue behind the one thousand options I already have.” Aremotobi’s point highlights a conversation crypto evangelists are familiar with: a monetary asset must have compelling use cases beyond being a value store. 

Perhaps, the CBN’s response to this line of thought would be in its three-point motivation for the eNaira. Through the digital currency, the apex bank wants to increase financial inclusion, reduce informality, and tap into Nigeria’s expanding remittance markets. The remittance play remains in the works, but the CBN has doubled down on its eNaira-powered financial inclusion agenda. That, however, is yet to demonstrate reasonable traction. 

ENaira versus mobile money

According to the IMF report on the eNaira, “Nigeria has a large informal economy….Once the eNaira becomes more widespread and embedded into the economy, it may bring greater transparency to informal payments.” This position highlights the ambitions of the eNaira to simultaneously penetrate the informal market as it strives to power financial inclusion nationwide. Essentially, the eNaira wants to operate with established mobile money frameworks.

To do this, the CBN can take either of two routes: leverage established mobile money networks to onboard CBDC users, or go all out to construct a retail access network. The former model will prevent the apex bank from providing retail banking services, and will require users to route their monies through their mobile money accounts to their eNaira wallets—a model that will come at an extra service cost. The bright side to this model, according to the IMF, is that it de-risks users’ mobile money balances—as the cash typically leaves the accounts of the financial institutions powering the mobile money services.

This strategy, despite being the eNaira’s best shot at bagging some financial inclusion laurels, shows a lack of understanding of Nigeria’s mobile money market. Unlike Kenya’s MPESA or Senegal’s Wave, mobile money in Nigeria is not primarily used to hold balances. The country’s leading players—Paga and Opay—are extensively adopted for cash-in cash-out transactions. Payments and transfers come second, and are mostly completed by cash-full customers. Even the option to convert from cash to CBDC wallets is likely to face hesitation as such behaviour is not in line with prevalent consumer trends.   

So far, the CBN’s drive to put eNaira on the streets has churned out initiatives like USSD-powered eNaira operations and account tiers for the unbanked. As an added incentive to proselytise the digital currency adoption, thousands of CBN’s staff receive stipends into their eNaira wallets. The apex bank also claims that it has encouraged major supermarkets to adopt payments in eNaira, but big names like Shoprite, Spar, and Addide are yet to demonstrate nationwide adoption. From a financial inclusion lens, these moves by the CBN seem laudable, but the struggling adoption suggests that there’s something still amiss in the strategy mix. 

Nosa Oyegun, who leads the product team at Kuda, describes the eNaira’s mission to capture informal markets as an uphill struggle. “Given how it [the eNaira] was rolled out, it’s tall order now. it’ll be hard because of how it stumbled out the blocks. [The rollout] should have been USSD-driven if that was the goal. 

From a product perspective, Oyegun believes the eNaira has all the elements needed to be dominant. ”The government is behind the eNaira, there’s hardly any bigger moat than any competitor could ever have,” he said.

Is trust the missing piece? 

The CBN and its eNaira have a trust deficit they must overcome. Actions such as the ban on crypto, closure of crypto-linked bank accounts, forex manipulations, and more recently, the naira redesign, have left a negative impression of the apex bank and its policies on most Nigerians. Tech and blockchain enthusiasts who were affected by the crypto crackdown scoff at the idea of a CBN-controlled blockchain currency, and decidedly avoid it. “I am not going to put my money under the full watch of the CBN, not after everything they’ve done to us. I can wake up and realise my money is all gone,” says Tage Okogu, a crypto enthusiast based in Lagos.

As Abraham Augustine argues in this piece, banking in its simplest form is the aggregation of trust transactions. The risk-averse saver trusts in the ability of the bank to keep the money while the bank trusts in its ability to keep the money safe and grow it by taking on risks. When the trust piece is missing on either side, banking collapses. Or—like is the case for the eNaira—fails to go beyond “a wave of limited adoption”.

Fonbnk is a web3 on-ramp that allows Africans to easily obtain cryptocurrency assets by exchanging their airtime credits. Meanwhile, Tanda claims to be one of the largest independent agent and merchant network platforms in East Africa to launch a first-of-its-kind airtime trading marketplace across its network of 40,000 agents.

According to a statement shared with TechCabal, through the partnership, Tanda agents and vendors across East Africa can act as airtime ‘market makers’ and access new revenue streams by buying and selling prepaid airtime for profit on Fonbnk’s distributed exchange.

“Tanda’s partnership with Fonbnk has the potential to be a game-changer, particularly in terms of driving user growth and monetisation. What’s especially exciting about this collaboration is the innovative bridge protocol developed in partnership with Fonbnk, which converts prepaid airtime to digital dollars — a first in the industry. This breakthrough approach enables DeFi for practical, real-world applications and can potentially transform the fintech landscape. I’m thrilled to be a part of this partnership and look forward to the opportunities it presents for both Tanda and Fonbnk,” said Geoffrey Mulei, Co-Founder & CEO of Tanda.

Fonbnk also claims that the collaboration with Tanda marks a significant financial inclusion breakthrough on the continent as it allows tens of thousands of retailers, agents, and micro-entrepreneurs to supplement their income by participating in the web3 economy, regardless of their banking status.

“Picture the potential impact of combining mobile money platform M-Pesa with decentralised finance automated market maker, Uniswap. That’s exactly the groundbreaking solution that Fonbnk has developed, and it could have the power to revolutionise financial inclusion throughout Africa,” said Christian Duffus, Co-Founder & CEO of Fonbnk.

Fresh off of its seed extension round —on the back of nearly 4000% year-over-year growth of new wallets with a greater than 300% increase in direct revenue—Fonbnk claims to be on track to generate over $100 million in GMV as part of its unique Web3 on- and off-ramp partnerships across all the leading Sub-Saharan African economies.

ChatGPT, which launched on Friday, is a conversational AI tool developed by OpenAI which allows users to input prompts and get responses in a dialogue format. According to OpenAI, ChatGPT can answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. It already has 1 million registered users since it launched five days ago.

One of ChatGPT’s abilities is responding with very specific output to prompts about computer code. In the example below, the tool is able to correctly explain a bug, provide a solution and also explain the fixed code.

StackOverflow, which launched in 2008, offers the same service. Users submit code and get assistance from the platform’s community of developers. However,  though ChatGPT’s output looks plausible and correct, it cannot be verified to be correct unless the user knows exactly what they are looking for.

This past weekend, Twitter was flooded with seemingly correct outputs from the tool. But some users have stated that it offers more gibberish responses than correct ones.

This is because ChatGPT does not compute code itself. Instead, as this article explains, it “employs a statistical model about what bits of language go together under different contexts.” Together with additional context from its Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) training from the user generated feedback, it is able to produce plausible-looking and detailed code snippets. 

According to a statement released by StackOverflow on Monday, many users are trying out ChatGPT to create answers to coding questions, which they then post to StackOverflow “without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting.” 

“…because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking or looking for correct answers,” said Stack Overflow in the statement.

Stack Overflow went on to state that because of the popularity of the ChatGPT tool, a lot of users are posting these code snippets which then puts a lot of pressure on its volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure. To reduce the influx of these ChatGPT responses, it took the decision to temporarily ban the use of ChatGPT to create posts.

The platform concludes that if a user is believed to have used ChatGPT after this temporary policy is posted, sanctions will be imposed on the said user to prevent them from continuing to post such content, even if the posts are found to be correct.

Naspers-owned Prosus acquired Stack Overflow in June 2021 for $1.8 billion, a deal both companies described as mutually beneficial. According to South African internet company Naspers’ most recent financial results, the platform grew revenue by 33% in the first half of 2022, to $45 million.

Game becomes the first South African retailer to join the metaverse and joins other SA companies like MTN and Nedbank who have both made a play in the metaverse. 

According to a statement, the game mixes South African culture and the fantastical in a challenge to race around a downtown city neighbourhood. Players will use potholes as portals, party at rooftop DJ gigs, and dodge goo from exploding pigeons as they compete to get to the top of the leaderboard.

Players entering the world will be tasked with finding 8 comet fragments (inspired by the retailer’s Black Friday ad campaign) around the city block—and those who are able to do this in the quickest time will win real-world prizes.

The top player for each day will win R5000 in vouchers, with the second receiving R3000 and the third R2000 worth of vouchers. The competition ends on 28 November, but the game will remain available in Roblox for players to enjoy.

Commenting on the launch, Game’s vice president of marketing Katherine Madley said, “We are so excited about this launch, as we open up our brand to a new audience…we have seen the incredible growth of the gaming sector globally and heard the call from consumers for brands to be more innovative in their approach.”

Madley further added that Game plans to continue growing its metaverse presence.

“Rather than a once-off project, we see this platform as an ongoing, integral part of our brand going forward. We are working to ensure we push this kind of innovation forward in our business, and plan to grow this offering,” she added.

The company made the announcement at its inaugural PrimeX event in Johannesburg, adding that the move is in line with the group’s strategy of entering new spaces, diversifying its content offerings and presenting advertisers with new and innovative platforms for maximum reach to forward-thinking audiences.

By entering Ubuntuland, Primedia plans to create more meaningful engagement and connection with its audience.

Primedia is a media giant, offering outdoor advertising via billboards to clients. The media house also owns radio stations 947 and CapeTalk, as well as TV news station Eyewitness News. In addition to these, Primedia claims it will use the newly purchased land in Ubuntuland to offer advertisers virtual billboards that replicate the presence  these platforms have in the real world, effectively becoming the sales house for Africarare.

Speaking on the land acquisition, Mic Mann, co-founder and CEO of Africarare, stated, “We are thrilled to welcome Primedia to Africarare. The remarkable prowess of this media giant has led their platforms to play an integral role in the lives of so many South Africans and we look forward to collaborating with them on solutions that will take that further and create new engagement opportunities for advertisers.”

Primedia joins the likes of MTN and Nedbank as the latest South African company to purchase land in Africarare’s Ubuntuland metaverse.

The partnership, which was announced at Google’s Cloud Next conference, will also see Coinbase move its data-related applications to Google from Amazon Web Services (AWS). The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. But Jim Migdal, Coinbase’s vice president of business development, said that Coinbase will earn a percentage of transactions that go through it, as it does in other Coinbase Commerce arrangements. 

The crypto payments service on Google cloud will start being available to a few customers and roll out to all customers over time. Google Cloud’s business accounts for 9% of Alphabet’s (its parent company) revenue. In Q2 2022, it made $6.2 billion from this segment. This is less than what its competitors, Microsoft and AWS, reported in the same period—$19.7 billion and $22.1 billion, respectively. Neither of them accepts crypto payments, so this partnership may give Google a competitive advantage. The Coinbase Commerce service currently supports 10 cryptocurrencies: bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ether, USD coin, tether USD, ApeCoin, bitcoin cash, DAI, Shiba Inu, and BCH. It will be integrated into the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure service in 2023. 

This partnership announcement comes at a time when the values of cryptocurrencies have plummeted, reaching record lows this year. In August, Coinbase announced a revenue decline of nearly 64% in Q2 as investors sold their cryptocurrencies. Despite that, Google is keen on exploring the web3 ecosystem. With this development, Google Cloud hopes to attract Web3-focused businesses and other businesses that are willing to adopt cryptocurrencies for payment. 

Some of the major customers of Google’s cloud service in Africa include pan-African telecommunication networks like Safaricom and MTN; e-commerce companies like South Africa’s Takealot; Konga; Kenya’s Twiga foods; and more. With the exception of MTN, none of these businesses has shown a particularly keen interest in Web3 or cryptocurrencies. This may be because the majority of African governments have expressed their disapproval of cryptocurrencies and punished those who break their laws. There is a very slim chance that any of these Google Cloud’s African clients will be included in the group of users who will experience the cryptocurrency payment platform for the first time.

Nedbank did not disclose how much it paid for the land.

According to their press release, the Nedbank village has a focus on customer value and services and aims to contain numerous experiences ranging from virtual gaming to a sports lounge.

Africarare is Africa’s first metaverse and houses settlers such as MTN, which purchased land in the metaverse in February. According to Nedbank, Africarare is highly sought-after by companies and individuals who wish to capitalise on the multiple opportunities presented by the metaverse.

“Creating experiences that go beyond banking has always been a focus for Nedbank. Our entry into the metaverse is not merely about having a presence in this space; it’s about meeting the needs of our clients on the platforms that resonate with them,” says Khensani Nobanda, group executive for marketing and corporate affairs at Nedbank Group.

For Africarare, Mic Mann, co-founder and CEO, stated that they are pleased to welcome Nedbank into the Ubuntuland metaverse.

“By entering the metaverse, this organisation will pave the way for new solutions for Africa and play a role in the future of banking in this exciting world,” Mann added.

Nedbank becomes the latest South African company to make a play in web 3.0 technologies. This week, retailer Mr Price also ran a competition giving away nine non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to its Instagram followers.

Blockchain is a distributed, unchangeable database that records financial transactions, monitors assets, and establishes a trustworthy network of participants. The concept may seem vague from afar, but come to think of it, a 19 year-old Nigerian is building his own blockchain. So, you can easily understand blockchain with the explanation we’ll provide in this article. 

In a blockchain, there are things called assets. There are tangible and intangible ones. 

Landed property, money, and automobiles are examples of tangible assets. Meanwhile, intangible ones include copyrights, intellectual property, patents, and branding. Essentially, a blockchain network allows for the secure and cheap tracking and trading of virtually any valuable asset. 

The significance of blockchain technology and why it matters 

Information is the fuel that keeps businesses going. This assertion is why it’s beneficial to swiftly and correctly exchange info. Blockchain technology is ideally suited for this kind of fast data delivery because it’s an unalterable record that only authorised participants in a network can view. 

A blockchain can monitor numerous parameters, including payments, orders, accounts, and production. As a result, you can witness every transaction step with complete clarity because everyone in the network sees the same accurate information.

Blockchain fundamentals

To help you further easily understand blockchain, here are its vital components:

Decentralised ledger technology

The distributed ledger is an incorruptible record of all transactions that anyone on the network can access. Thanks to this ledger, transactions only need to be recorded once. In turn, this feature saves time and money compared to more traditional corporate networks.

Unalterable records

It’s impossible for any participant to alter or delete a transaction already added to the shared ledger. Therefore, in the event of an error in a transaction record, one must facilitate a new transaction to undo the mistake and for both transactions to be viewable.

Smart contracts

These contracts are a set of rules recorded on the blockchain and then carried out mechanically to expedite transactions. Many other types of agreements can be codified in a smart contract, from the transfer of company bonds to the payment of travel insurance premiums.

Blockchain technology and how to easily understand its functions

The following are functions to help you easily understand blockchain:

Syncing all preceding and succeeding blocks

Each link in this information chain represents a different location or owner as an asset is transferred or traded. Blocks link securely to ensure that no one can modify two blocks in any way or that no one can introduce a new block between two existing ones. And these actions are aided by time confirmation and transaction order tracking.  

Completed transaction storage in a data block

 Transactions reveal the transfer of an asset, which may be physical (a product) or abstract (a service) (intellectual). Information such as the recipient, item, time, location, cost, and status can can all fit in the data block.

Transactions form a block in an immutable chain

More blocks mean that the blockchain as a whole is more secure. This position provides the blockchain with its primary strength, inalterability, by making evident all attempts to alter the data. 

Therefore, we eliminate the risk of manipulation by fraudsters and create a ledger of transactions that you and various network users can trust.

Blockchain advantages

Duplicate documentation and external checks on operations frequently waste time and resources. Also, information storage systems are susceptible to hacking and other forms of fraud. Additionally, data verification times may be lengthened by a lack of openness. 

Therefore, the need for a better way to quicken the profit-inhibiting sluggish pace of businesses arises. And blockchain is a solution. The following are advantages of the concept.

Intuitive reliance

If you’re part of a private network, blockchain ensures that your records are only accessible to people you authorise in your network.  

Safety increases

No transaction can be removed, not even by an admin.

Increased productivity

You can reconcile records without wasting time when everyone in a network uses a distributed ledger. In addition, smart contracts, which are pre-written sets of instructions, can be recorded on the blockchain and effected mechanically to expedite the processing of financial transactions.

Blockchain infrastructures

You can accomplish the construction of a blockchain network in various ways. For example, they may be structured as public, private, authorised, or consensus networks.

Authorised blockchain networks

Permissioned blockchain networks are businesses’ most common type of private blockchain. 

Here, there are limits to who can join the network and what kind of transactions they can conduct on it. A membership invitation or permission slip is required for entry.

Distributed ledger technology (Blockchain) public networks

Blockchains like Bitcoin’s are examples of public blockchains, which anybody may join and use. Here, there’s a need for considerable computational power. Also, there’s susceptibility to transaction privacy compromise and faulty security. These are crucial factors to think about for blockchain applications in the business world.

Private blockchain infrastructure

Private and public blockchain networks share similarities. But unlike the latter, a single entity manages the private network, deciding who can join, enforcing a consensus process, and managing the distributed ledger. 

Consensus networks

Distributed ledger technology (Blockchain) allows data management to be split between multiple entities. This community decides who can submit transactions and who can view the data.

Final thoughts

There’s no pressing need to migrate immediately to blockchain technology if your business’s present database meets your needs. This position stands given that blockchain technology is in a constant state of development and improvement. 

In any case, if a decentralised system of record sounds great for your business, the benefits and potentials of blockchain technology are worth exploring for the future.

NFTs (or non-fungible tokens) appear to be everywhere at the moment. According to Forbes, these digital goods are selling like 17th-century exotic Dutch tulips and sales generate millions of dollars in nft marketplaces.

As NFTs get more popular, the concept raises more and more questions. For example, how do you explain monkey photos fetching seven figures in dollars? How do you wrap your head around news from NFT marketplaces showing million-dollar hacks sales?

But the most asked questions are probably  “What exactly is an NFT?” and “Where can I buy or sell NFTs?” We’re here to answer these two questions for you.

What is an NFT?

The term “NFT” stands for Non-Fungible Token. Non-fungible tokens are digital assets that substitute for physical things like works of art, media variables, etc. Nfts trade hands digitally and are built on the blockchain, which is the same underlying technology used for cryptocurrencies which are used to buy and sell NFTs. 

The origin of NFTs dates back to 2014/15. Currently, the most prominent use of NFTs is in exchanging digital works of art. 

What should you buy or sell in the NFT marketplace list 

Although NFTs may theoretically be used to sell anything digital, the most prominent use of NFTs today is in exchanging digital works of art. 

NFT marketplaces for you

The following are major NFT exchange platforms available today.

The Axie Market

This platform is one of the biggest NFT marketplaces you’ll find around. Axie Marketplace functions as the storefront for the Axie Infinity game.

Tokens for Axie Infinity are known as Axie Shards, and they are developed on the Ethereum network. You may purchase and sell them on several different NFT markets and cryptocurrency exchange platforms.

Players can earn prizes by purchasing ’legendary animals’ called Axies. You can train your Axie to compete against other players’ Axies. At the Axie Marketplace, players may acquire NFTs in the form of brand new Axies, as well as entire territories and other commodities.

NBA Top Shot Marketplace

Top Shot is a limited marketplace created by the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the Womens NBA,  using Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain.  Top Shot’s online marketplace makes it simple to register and make purchases. To acquire a beautiful moment on Top Shot may cost as little as $9.

Larva Labs/CryptoPunks

The CryptoPunks NFT project by Larva Labs is widely regarded as the Larva Labs’ crowning achievement. Some CryptoPunks have reportedly sold millions of dollars after being initially distributed for free in 2017. 

Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks NFTs are primarily available to bid on from several third-party markets. For example, you may bid on Meebits through Larva Labs’ internal market. 

Larva Labs has additional digital art projects underway, such as Autoglyphs. They’re also brewing other Ethereum blockchain-based initiatives that are worth looking out for. 

OpenSea

OpenSea is in a league of its own when it comes to NFT trading. OpenSea is a digital asset exchange platform that allows users to freely register and explore various digital artefacts. 

If you’re an artist or designer, you can take advantage of its helpful features and simple setup to make your own NFT. The NFT creation process is known as “minting.”

There are over 150 different tokens for transactions on the website. OpenSea is a fantastic point to start or continue your NFT journey. 

SuperRare

SuperRare is another NFT marketplace. It’s centred on establishing a commercial centre for digital artists. The site features visual works such as paintings, movies, photographs, and 3D graphics. 

Recently, SuperRare unveiled its own digital currency known as “SuperRare.” It’s built on the Ethereum network. 

Spending money on NFTs

As you invest in digital assets, collectables, and art through these and other NFT marketplaces, bear in mind that this is a relatively new venture. As such, any investments you make will be risky. There’s no certainty that the value of any one NFT will increase dramatically.

Several factors like the creator’s status and the uniqueness of their art may influence the value of the digital collectables. Therefore, evaluate your investment intentions, financial situation, and time horizon before deciding what to buy.